The Williston Scholars program gives students opportunities to explore personal interest. In my case, it is trying to keep our feet healthy.
I will be spending 12 weeks this trimester studying the impact shoes can cause on your body. There are studies that talk about what injuries shoes can cause, how they are made, and what difference shoes even make. My intent is to connect all these ideas while including the new wave of barefoot shoes.
The Williston Scholars program began in 2011 and “is a college-model course that introduces students to the rigors of directed independent study,” according to Williston.com. Scholars is a one-trimester class that gives you an option to study either history, language, math, science, visual performing arts, or English. The reason I have decided on the science program is because there are a lot of athletes who have lost their abilities to perform due to minor inconvenient injuries, and I believe this study could help prevent some of them.
According to a Science Daily article by Patrick McKeon, a professor at Ithica College’s School of Health Sciences and Human Performance, the small muscles in the foot “play a vital but under-appreciated role in movement and stability.”
McKeon goes on to explain how feet should also be considered as another “core muscle” of the body, just like your abdominals.
Barefoot shoes are created to maximize the connection of your feet to the ground. They do this by minimizing the sole of the shoe and the thickness of the bottom of the shoe, almost like a sandal. One company that creates these barefoot shoes is Airhas, which is the brand of shoe I have most recently purchased to use in my experiments. I purchased my pair for $45, while other companies like Be Lenka sell their product for roughly $150.
Anya’s reviews, Vivobarefoot, Barbarics, Be Lenka, and Airhas are some of the main places where you can find barefoot shoes.
Blayne Lapan, Williston’s Director of Sports Performance, believes that the benefits of being barefoot is based around the how your feet grasp the ground.
“When our feet are connected to the ground it kind of set the foundation for how we move when you train barefoot you’re getting all of the intrinsic muscles in the feet the small muscles in the feet to be active and to coordinate together to accomplish a task,” he said. “It helps to build that strong base and we would do it if I was in a private facility, but I have to be mindful of like having to be really mindful about liabilities.”
Lapan also got into a broad scientific view of how walking barefoot and walking in shoes is completely different.
“For sure at our current shoes have a really thick heel so it throws off our center mass it causes our pelvis to adjust our upper body to find balance through our foot and the shoes have a really pointy toe so it causes our toes to kind of melt together when in reality your toes should be like fingers,” Lapan said. “If you look at indigenous tribes who walk barefoot their feet are almost like another set of hands, they’re really wide at the toes that’s the widest part of their foot and they have tremendous amount of dexterity and in their toes because they’re constantly moving barefoot.”
Peter Mahon, a Williston graduate of the 2025 class, owns a pair of barefoot shoes and wears them religiously.
“I had heard about them from some friends who went to my gym, and they said they were good lifting shoes,” he said. “The biggest difference for me was the stability I had while lifting. It felt like I was much more connected to the ground. I like them more than any shoes I had lifted in before because they had a wider sole which allowed my foot to spread out.”
Peter used to lift in just socks, but he believes that the barefoot shoes offer that “direct contact with the ground.”
“It’s a draw for many people because you can get the ground contact of being barefoot while not giving up any grip that a normal shoe has,” Peter said. “That allows you to run, jump, and do compound movements while still feeling grounded.”
